All Seasons Table
Winter, spring, summer and fall. Chinese food is delicious in all seasons. So it should come as no surprise that one of the best Chinese restaurants in Greater Boston is a place called All Seasons Table. We're on Pleasant Street in Malden, Massachusetts, and from the moment you walk into All Seasons Table, you realize this ain't your typical Chinese takeout joint. This is a big, stylish, nice looking restaurant. You have high ceilings, beautiful sculptures, and a big, long bar. In fact, they have two big, long bars. Now the menu here is big. It is extensive.
Chinese food is definitely the number one star attraction here, but it is really a pan-Asian restaurant. So you have Chinese, Japanese, Malaysian, Korean, Thai, all of your favorite Asian dishes all appearing on one All Star Asian menu. It's owned and operated by Douglas Tran. He has owned a number of restaurants over the years, but All Seasons Table is definitely his pride and joy. And after 18 years in business, this place just keeps on getting better and better.
I don't know about you, but when I go out for Chinese food, I tend to overdo it on the appetizers, and you definitely want to do that here. The appetizer sampler has everything that you want to dig into immediately. Spring rolls, crab Rangoon, chicken fingers, beef and chicken teriyaki, gyoza, boneless ribs, chicken wings. The two biggest standouts on the sampler platter are definitely the crab Rangoon and the boneless ribs. They make these crab rangoons fresh every single day. They're nice and golden and crispy on the outside, packed with that mixture of cream cheese and crab inside, nothing better than a nice, plump Rangoon, plenty of crunch.
The boneless ribs here are legendary. They are sweet, they are tender, they are meaty, they are impossible to resist. Now let's talk Thai. You want a great Thai dish? You want to get the Drunken Noodles. So this is a classic, traditional Thai noodle dish. It's made with a combination of chicken and shrimp, and it's cooked up with all those beautiful aromatic Thai spices and chilies. Like all great Thai foods, it has everything you're looking for, that combination of flavors, sweet and spicy, savory and tangy. And after you have a couple of these Mai Tai's, Drunken Noodles, just seems appropriate.
When you talk about classic Chinese-American dishes, nothing is better than an order of General Gau’s Chicken. Plump, fresh white meat chicken, and the Gau is really all about the sauce. This is a spicy ginger, garlic sauce. It's sweet, it's spicy, it completely coats every nook and cranny of that chicken, and it comes with some broccoli. So General Gao is obviously a health nut.
A couple of the most popular entrees here are actually specials, but they're so special, they're pretty much always available year round. I love the crispy duck. Nice, beautifully cooked duck with a really crunchy exterior skin. If soft shell crab is on the menu, you want to order that they basically tempura fry an entire crab, salt, pepper, little tempura batter. That's all you need. And this soft shell crab is hard to beat.
These are like no other steak tip you have ever tasted. These are a filet mignon steak tip. These steak tips are cooked in a blend of garlic and black pepper, and they're served over a bed of mixed veggies and some mushrooms. They come in bite sized pieces, but you wouldn't even need a knife to slice this thing. It is ridiculously tender and impossibly good.
This is the hard shell lobster stir fry. This is a fresh lobster. It's one and a half pounds. It comes from local waters. You got your claws, your tails, your knuckle. When you take a great lobster, cut it up into pieces and you stir fry that baby up over high heat with lots of ginger and lots of green onion, you get a flavor that just explodes. It bursts with freshness and sweetness and that nice kick of ginger. Everybody loves a steamed lobster or a big stuffed lobster, but once you’ve tried a stir fried lobster, you may never go back. That is luscious.
Sushi is extremely popular here as well. This is the Torched Atlantic salmon roll. So this has spicy crab meat topped with some torch salmon and tobiko. For something a little bit different, try the Golden Maki. This is made with salmon crab and avocado, and it's all wrapped inside a tempura fried roll. And it's finished with the chef's special sauce. The number one roll I recommend here is definitely the Scotty Maki. So this has a spicy seafood salad topped with tuna and a wasabi infused tobiko with some crunchy taro. Beautiful to look at and incredible to eat.
The city of Malden has a lot of good restaurants and a lot of really good Asian restaurants. But if you ask me, I think All Seasons Table is “all good” in terms of taste and style. So now I hope you're all ready to come to All Seasons Table.
